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After a few years of testing and a few changes to the original design, the time came for the final version: we got more devices and the prototype wasn’t big enough.

I made the final version from canarywood scraps I had lying around. The space on the wall allowed me to fit a thirty inch wide shelf to hold the devices. Hopefully this will suffice for all the devices the household requires. To make the shelf I glued together two pieces of canarywood, drilled holes at the base of each slot, and finally cut out the thirteen slots with a hand saw. Shaping and smoothing these slots and, finally, sanding them was extremely time consuming. My saw cuts weren’t precisely tangent to the holes I drilled, so those transitions all needed attention. I had to round over all of the top corners. Finishing end grain is always more work, and this design creates a lot of exposed end grain that is hard to get to. Is there a way to change the design to make the build easier?

I glued a continuous strip of the EPDM rubber along the slots. I punched a 7/64″ hole and then cut a slit leading up to the hole.

My final selection for the cable gripping rubber was EPDM rubber, 1/16 inch thick, and 40A hardness. I originally used 1/8 inch holes. The 1/8″ holes are great when they work, because they grip the cables tightly, but they are too small for some thick USB cables. I had to increase the size to 7/64″ to accommodate these fatter cables. This does mean that the rubber almost never actually grips the cable. It just confines it. For my prototype I glued on the rubber using epoxy, but the rubber peeled off in some places. In looking for an alternative I found Nexabond, a slow curing cyanoacrylate adhesive, which seems to dissolve the rubber and create a very strong bond. Nexabond is now sold as Rapid Fuse. I used the variety marketed for wood. I found that it’s not possible to clean it off the rubber, so I had to be careful when applying it to avoid excessive squeeze out, but to use enough to secure the rubber all the way to the edge of the wood.

The rubber loosely grips the cables. The USB plug can rest in the space in front of the rubber in each slot.

The cable management box was hard for me to design. My original design left the wrapped cables exposed. I found that users often leave the ends of the cables dangling over the cable management box rather than securing them above on the shelf. The dangling cables combined with the exposed wrapped cables form a very busy visual image, and it is hard to identify the loose ends that you may want to plug into your dying device. In the prototype, I added a cover secured with a pair of magnets. Maybe this approach could work somehow, but two problems would need to be addressed. I was never sure where to put the cover after removing it, and I found it hard to close it because the cover would snap suddenly into place and I had to make sure it didn’t capture any cables over its whole width. However, a normal hinged door would extend 15 inches, which seems unwieldy. I considered doors that swiveled down, but one of them would collide with the USB hub. Finally, after talking with a friend about my design challenge, I revisited the idea of a hinged door and hit on the idea of a door that folds in half.

Two doors, each with a hinge in the center so they can fold in half. Note the continuous grain lines across all four parts of the door.

The center section opens first.

If necessary you can open the second section of the doors, which have their own separate magnetic latches.

Selecting hinges was another challenge. I hadn’t been planning to spend so much on hardware for this project. The hidden hinges in the middle of each door are Soss Invisible hinges, and I ended up using Brusso brass butt hinges to mount the doors to the frame. The Soss hinges come in a brass finish, which would have blended better, but when I found these on ebay for half price I decided I’d take them. I love magnets, but getting the right magnetic force seems to be an ongoing challenge. In this case, I mounted 3/8 inch magnets using screw in cups. The resulting magnetic force was excessive. One solution is to recess the mating washers farther into the wood (to increase the distance), but once the magnets are installed it is impossible to remove them. In fact, once the steel cups are installed I find that they fit so tightly it is impossible to remove them, even before screwing them in. Covering the magnets with high friction disks provided some extra separation that weakened the magnetic force enough to make the doors useful, though they do still stick shut a little bit more strongly than I would prefer.

For securing the cables I use a pair of 3/8 inch dowels and wrap the cables in a figure eight fashion. I have seen quite a few gizmos for managing cables and, from what I can tell, none of them works as well as just wrapping cables in a figure eight; the cables don’t tangle, and you don’t need a special device. Try it with your earbuds. A strip of velcro holds each cable in place. I used a two inch wide strip of white velcro hook material for the back of the box and I secured the cables using 3/4 inch black loop strips. Reportedly the loop side of the velcro wears out first, so I used it in the more easily replaceable location. Along the top edge of the box I made small cutouts for rubber cable holders. These hold the cables up if you open the box.

The doors open all the way out and can tuck up against the wall at the sides. We secure the cables using figure eight wrapping onto two posts, with a strip of velcro to hold them in place. I chose white velcro for the background so it’s easy to see the black velcro that holds down the cables.

Installation of the Soss hinges requires a weird shaped mortise 3/8 inches wide with rounded ends and a deeper center section. I drilled this using a centering drill guide and a brad point bit. I had some trouble with hole depth and later found myself trying to deepen parts of the mortises with chisels. But eventually I got the mortises cut. For hardware installation I chose to use machine screws, both for the Soss hinges and the Brusso hinges. Many people recommend machine screws for wood, especially when the screws are small and short. I thought I would be installing and removing the screws many times, so this supported my decision to use machine screws. In the case of the Soss hinges, the fit in the mortises was very tight. They weren’t going anywhere. It was hard to take the hinges out after test fitting them in the holes. Strength of the screws wouldn’t have made a difference. And since it was so hard to install and remove the hinges I ended up doing it only one time and doing the finishing with the hinges installed. I also broke two 4-40 taps cutting the threads. In retrospect, I think this happened because I pre-drilled holes that were a size too small.

I installed the Brusso hinges using chisels and a router plane, a process that I enjoyed much more than drilling with a guide. And I didn’t break the tap when cutting threads for 2-56 screws. Using machine screws here seemed like the right thing to do. The hinges didn’t stay in their mortises from friction alone like the Soss ones, and the use of machine screws enabled me to use longer screws on the frame and shorter ones on the door without having to buy two boxes of screws. My wire cutters cut easily through the brass machine screws so I could make the lengths I needed. I did end up installing and removing the hinges several times.

One disappointment is that the Soss hinges have a little bit of slop in them. I’m not sure if I loosened them up somehow while prying them out of their mortises after test fitting, but if I close the doors without trying to force them upward they don’t create an even gap.

Uniform gap between the doors.

Uneven gap between the doors, narrower at the top.

The final component of the charging station is the hub holder. As long as we charge devices using cables, the rest of the ensemble can remain unchanged, but this hub is the part most likely to change in the future. It already changed: I have a new hub with more ports. I didn’t want to work too hard on this part so I used a simple design that is very easy to make and somewhat adaptable—unlike the prototype it can at least accommodate charging hubs of varying length. This design requires no complex joinery since the wood grain all runs in the same direction. I tried to shape it to echo the curves of the shelf at the top, with the the back section sticking out to the sides for easy screw mounting.

Very simple hub holder design with open ends.

I think overall this is a great design for a charging station. It only uses wall space, not desk space, and keeps all our devices out of the way. I’m happy with the final result. The only thing that could be improved is the location of cable holding holes in the rubber. These holes are about an inch behind the front of the slot, and this is a little bit too far. Three fourths of an inch would be better.

After finishing the Utilitarian Cabinet I said I was going to lay off the plywood for a long while. Events conspired against me: we needed a small table or cabinet to fill the narrow space beside the couch and the remaining walnut plywood was just right for the job.

For this cabinet I borrowed a Festool Domino to make the joints for the case and drawers. The Domino is a lot nicer than dowels. It can make one pair of tight fitting mortises for alignment and loose fitting holes elsewhere, which makes the joint much easier to assemble and disassemble than dowels. This cabinet went together without the struggles that we had with the dowel-joined Utilitarian Cabinet—I was able to do it without a helper. The drawers went together very easily as well, and the dominos helped in assembling the miter joints in the pedestal and in affixing the pedestal to the case.

I also experimented with the undermounting Blum Tandem-Plus Blumotion drawer slides, which waste less space at the sides of the drawers. With the drawer cavity only seven inches wide I wanted to make the widest drawers I could. Understanding the requirements for these slides proved to be rather difficult. Blum is very bad about posting detailed information, and they also sell different products in Canada than they do in the USA, so Lee Valley has products that are not otherwise available in the USA. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me—though it should have been—that the undermounting slides would have a minimum drawer width. It is not easy to figure out what this minimum width is. Lee Valley didn’t know, and when I asked Blum USA about the Canadian slides they couldn’t find the answer! I eventually learned that the Tandem-Plus would work on my narrow drawers as long as I used special “locking devices”. The undermounting slides waste less horizontal space but they consume over an inch of vertical space. This led to a problem when I positioned the handle without checking the position carefully and the mounting screw hole hit the drawer bottom.

See the recess I carved into the drawer bottom to allow me to attach the drawer pull?

When I went to fit the drawers into the cabinet they worked right the first time. This is a huge contrast to my experience with the side mounting slides I used in the Utilitarian Cabinet where I had to spend hours on drawer fitting. I had a brief problem with it when I did the final test fit and the drawer hit the case. It turned out I had accidentally pressed the levers that raised the drawer. Lowering the drawer back to the correct position was very easy. The finished drawers open and close very smoothly and much more easily than the drawers in the Utilitarian Cabinet, though we’re not sure we like the Blumotion drawer closing action. Because the drawers are tall and narrow I used the wood with the grain running vertically and I mounted the handles vertically.

Note the continuous grain on the mahogany drawer fronts.

The corner in which the cabinet sits is not square. It was necessary to curve the edge considerably to get a reasonable fit.

This post is a round up of small kitchen organization projects, inspired by a few recently completed ones, but including some projects from years ago.

Organize a Bottom Freezer

This one isn’t very interesting as a woodworking project, but might be interesting to people looking for a solution to the problem of organizing a bottom freezer. Our old refrigerator had a top freezer, and I had containers in the door, labeled on the side, and shelves in the freezer space. The new freezer has a big open cavity and a sliding top drawer. How could I use this space effectively? When I looked around online for ideas on freezer organization, I didn’t see anything that looked both effective and efficient.

For the sliding top drawer, my solution is to use these air-tight containers that can be turned sideways and labeled on their sides.
For labeling I find that the Pentel Wet Erase Chalk Marker works well. It resists water, but can be washed off of smooth surfaces easily when desired (though it mysteriously does not come off in the dishwasher). The only problem is that these particular containers have a rough area on the side, from which the pen does not clean off.

For organizing the bottom some people put things in containers, but this wastes scarce freezer space. I made wooden dividers to partition the big, open space into sections sized to quart freezer bags.

The left side is divided into six spaces. The right side is divided into four larger spaces.

I cut these dividers from quarter inch plywood using my band saw, but a jigsaw would work too. There is no need to finish them. Observe how the dividers fit into the gap in the freezer frame at the far right and left sides.

These are the dividers for the right side. The top one is cut to match the slope of the back send of the freezer. The lower piece, which runs left to right when assembled, has a small notch to fit onto the plastic divider that came with the freezer.

Measuring Cups & Spoons

We have a lot of measuring cups and spoons. Some of them hang on hooks from holes in the handles, but we had a plastic set with no hang holes that I hung using magnets. The nice thing about the magnets was that it was very easy to hang them or grab them. The troublesome thing was that adhering magnets to the polyethylene measuring cups required an expensive adhesive and they would eventually fall off. I got new stainless steel measuring cups and their different shape and increased weight made the magnets a more troublesome solution. So I came up with this approach that exploits the little tabs on the ends of the cups. (However the one cup measure has no tab and requires a little support bar underneath.)

This measuring cup rack is angled 45 degrees to the wall. It might be slightly easier to use if it was a bit closer to horizontal.

I attempted to drill the large holes using an expansive auger bit. These tools seem to be plentiful on ebay but they don’t seem to work. (Why did they make so many if the tools didn’t work?) In each case the center hole cut by the lead screw would grow until the bit could wobble around in the hole with nothing guiding the cut. The deepest I could cut was about 3/16″ before it became impossible to make further progress. I had to cut out the centers with a coping saw and finish the edges with a drawknife. With a drill press and a circle cutter this job would be easy, in theory, but when I equipped my drill press with this unbalanced cutter the lateral forces caused the chuck to fall off. The chuck continued to fall off periodically after that, until I learned the trick of freezing the arbor.

I marked the sizes using punches and then inking them with pens. Curiously some pens, like the Pigma Micron, seem to be ruined by writing on wood. They never started writing again after I used them for this job.

For years we hung the other measuring cups on a store bought rack, which really didn’t work well. The hooks would fall off, and it wasn’t well organized. So to go with the rack above I made a rack with designated hooks:

For the measuring spoons I made this rack by attaching veneer to a square foot sheet of plywood:

Pen and Paper on the Fridge

We need pen and paper available at the fridge. To make a pen holder I started with a small scrap of cherry. I used the router to cut out a recess in the block of wood and I installed some magnets on the back. If I was going to make one of these today, I’d probably glue together two layers to avoid using the router.

To hold paper we used a plastic rack for many years, but its weak magnets resulted in frequent trips to the floor, and it eventually cracked beyond repair. I made a much nicer wooden replacement from quarter sawn cherry I had left over from the file cabinet.

Now we just need to figure out how to keep people from walking off with the pens.

Room for four pens.

Five quarter inch rare earth magnets keep this firmly in place on the refrigerator.

Look at the fantastic quarter sawn fleck figure.

This needed to be thicker than the pen holder. I made it from several pieces rather than hollowing it out by router. It is also much newer than the pen holder. Is the lighter color due to fewer years of darkening? Or is it a lighter colored tree?

Next time I think I would use a smaller number of larger magnets. But this holds securely even on the slightly curved surface of our new refrigerator.

Hanging Utensils on the Wall

We bought a rack for hanging utensils on the wall, but then we ran out of room. So I made a pegboard out of oak. I built it using frame and panel construction with oak plywood for the panel. I used a piece of pegboard to guide the drilling of the holes in the oak plywood.

The Talon pegboard hooks hold utensils well, though I did have to clip off some of them with wire cutters to get a good fit for some items.

From the front the oak frame blends in with the cabinet. The non-woodworkers don’t notice the change in grain.

Cooling Rack

For mounting cooling racks I made magnetic bars by setting 1/8″ thick half-inch rare earth magnets into 1/4″ thick wooden bars. The magnets hold the bar onto the fridge and also hold the steel cooling racks. They worked well—until we switched to a stainless steel rack that was only barely magnetic. Each of the three bars could hold its own steel cooling rack, but all three bars together barely keep the stainless one on the fridge. A better design would probably make use of hooks instead of magnets to hold the stainless steel racks.

Three bars with magnets embedded in them.

Barely holding up a stainless cooling rack.

Draining rack by the sink—fail

We have the dish soap and hand soap by the sink and that area stays constantly wet, leading to mold. I tried building a draining rack to improve this situation. I used the router to cut grooves in a piece of ipe. (I think I killed the router bit.) Underneath the groves are perpendicular so water drains all the way through. The first problem was that the wood stayed wet underneath. I discovered that tiny insects had taken up residence. To correct this problem I raised the wood up off the counter on rubber feet. This got rid of the bugs, but I now have brown staining coming from the wood. It seems that wood is not the right material for this application.

This project is a utility cabinet to hold paper and related tools, with a space for the rotary trimmer on top. It seemed like a good opportunity to use up 1.5 sheets of walnut plywood that I bought years ago for a project that got canceled. I also had a walnut board I had bought to use for edging, and some iron-on walnut veneer tape. Of course, the first thing I had to do was hit the lumberyard for three more sheets of plywood and another chunk of walnut. But the plywood I needed to buy was Baltic birch for interior structure.

In addition to storing standard sheets of letter size paper, I wanted storage for stacks of over-sized paper, large sheets of Japanese paper that are rolled onto tubes, and assorted bottles of glue and paint. To do this I decided to put racks on the door. I threw in some drawers because I figured they would be useful. One odd design element was two skinny cubbies on the left, which are there so that you can open the drawers without having to open the door more than 90 degrees.

The drawers can open when the doors are only open ninety degrees. A friend gave me some leftover quarter sawn sycamore for the left hand rack. I used the some maple scraps for the right hand rack.

For hardware I wanted to give knife hinges a try because I’ve always liked their elegant, minimalist look. I decided to use rare earth magnets to hold the door closed, with a magnet on the bottom edge of the door and another one in the case. This would be elegant and unobtrusive. However, experimentation with this idea suggested that the magnets weren’t strong enough, so I did a direct and inelegant magnet-to-metal closure. Even this seems surprisingly weak: it holds the door closed but it won’t pull it closed. It seems like my kitchen cabinets close more strongly with weaker magnets. Note also the layout of the drawer pulls: I placed them all the same distance from the bottom edge of the drawer, which looks a bit odd if you view the cabinet from directly in front, but it looks right when you see the cabinet from a normal viewing angle, where the top of the top drawer is hidden by the cabinet’s case.

This door rack was meant to hold all the bottles. I had a lot of trouble figuring out the right dimensions. What can I put in the tiny shelf in the middle that is empty right now? Another observation is that the rack is full already.

This rack holds tubes with oversized sheets of paper. Plenty of room remains for expansion on this side.

The top provides plenty of space for using the paper trimmer.

The back of the cabinet is finished. This required a lot of extra work. Did it make sense, given that I’m planning to put the cabinet against a wall?

Construction Notes

It’s been a while since I made a piece of furniture out of plywood. I think it will be a long while before I do it again. Plywood and solid wood each call for different tools and impose different design constraints. I’m not set up for plywood. I cut my parts with a circular saw and some of the cuts weren’t perfect. Truing up edges of plywood with a hand plane is not a pleasant task. I realized one of the reasons for frame and panel construction beyond dealing with wood movement: all four sides of the panel are (mostly) side grain, which is easily planed.

I decided to join the case together using dowel joinery, so I made a jig by drilling holes in a scrap of wood with the drill press and tried to fit a test joint together. It required huge clamping forces to close the joint and it would pop back open the moment I removed the clamps. I figured the holes must be slightly crooked due to slop from using a wooden jig, so I bought metal bushings and tried again, but I couldn’t get that to work either. I gave up and bought an expensive commercial jig, which worked fine; the need for that extra jig was kind of annoying because I don’t anticipate doing a lot of dowel joinery in the future. (What could I have done instead?)

Another problem I didn’t notice soon enough is that all of the plywood was warped. Once the joints were cut and I fit the case together I noticed that the sides bowed out and the bottom bowed up. I tried to force the bottom flat by gluing a stiffening piece of solid wood on the underside, but my piece of wood was only 1.5″ thick, which was evidently too wimpy to help. When I glued in the dividers I used clamps to force the sides flat. This process was successful. However, I neglected to pay attention to the top, which had previously been the only flat part of the case. Forcing the sides flat caused the top to bow upwards, so the top is not flat. If I’d been paying attention I could have corrected this before the glue dried. With solid wood I could plane the top flat but not with plywood. So I’m stuck. It seems like the solution to this problem is to assume that every piece of plywood will be warped and to build into the design some sort of straightening element.

I chose a mitered edging for the doors and I realized a disadvantage of mitered edging: the nice corners of the miter get messed up if you have to plane the door to fit. Of course, the doors turned out to be warped as well. I hoped that attaching the racks would help hold them flat, and I think it did help, but they remain slightly curved, which complicated the fitting of the knife hinges. I tried to tune the fit of the doors in the opening by shimming the hinges, but this shifted the hinges out of alignment with each other. They got harder to turn and I found that brass was wearing off into the hinge joint. I’m hoping that brass will wear until the hinges work smoothly. The warped plywood also created mismatches where the doors met each other. At the bottom the right door sticks out from the case. I tried to conceal this by rounding off the edge of the door. At the top the doors don’t meet. I couldn’t think of anything extra to do that would actually make this look better. At least I was able to get a small, uniform gap between the two doors.

Note the mismatch of the doors at the top. I think this occurred because of the warped case. Efforts to shim the hinges didn’t fix it.

A modest roundover and slight shaping actually hides this problem rather well.

The right hand door sticks out from the case it looks pretty bad.

I worked the edge extensively with a plane and spokeshave to make the doors meet, and the result is surprisingly good. A casual observer doesn’t notice anything amiss.

I made the space for the drawers 18″ deep, but I realized belatedly that once the drawer front was taken into account, a full 18″ long drawer slide might not fit. Fortunately some manufacturers’ slides are 450 mm (17.7″) instead, but this limited my options. I wanted overtravel because the drawers would be underneath a 4.5 inch overhang. Accuride tech support insisted that for twenty inch wide drawers I needed to use their premium slide (7434) because of concerns about racking even though the weights would be very small. The cheaper one is explicitly listed only for drawers less than 16″ wide. I wonder if this is really necessary? Luck was with me and I was able to find exactly the slides I needed on ebay for half price.

The drawer slides cover the dowel pins, but one is visible on the top drawer.

Because the cabinet is utilitarian, and because the drawers are hidden inside, I made the drawers entirely out of Baltic birch plywood. I cut the drawer fronts so that the grain runs continuously across all four drawers, but the grain of the Baltic birch is so mild it’s hard to notice. I made the drawers with rabbets in the front, which I cut on the router table, and I pinned all four joints with quarter inch dowels. Even so, the drawers did not come out perfectly square and true. The process of fitting the drawer slides was long and tedious. I discovered that at least in one case, the reveals changed when the drawer was loaded. It seems like fitting solid wood drawers is a simpler and less frustrating process. (When I installed metal drawer slides in the file cabinet I also found it difficult and time consuming.) I had thought about using an applied front, but wasn’t sure how I could hold them in place accurately enough and long enough to screw them on. I think the applied front is the way to go when dealing with these slides. Maybe three minute epoxy is the answer.

Note the gap between the cabinet wall and the top and bottom shelf. The center fixed shelf has no gap.

I bought some inexpensive shelf support sleeves and pins, thinking that the pins would slip neatly and snugly into the sleeves. It seems that the hardware makers have a different concept: the pins sit loosely in the sleeves. This is not satisfying. Brusso makes expensive solid brass pins and sleeves that I might try in the future, but they seemed too expensive for this project, especially considering that I wanted to have shelf holes every 3/4 inch for fine adjustment of the shelves. I selected some L-shaped brackets. They fit well in their 1/4″ holes, but I don’t really like these either because they force you to leave a larger gap at the end of the shelf. The handles I selected taught me another hardware lesson. They look good, but they are hard to use because you have to bend down to reach the graspable part of the handle. Even my short kids have complained about this!

I edged all of the shelves with the iron-on walnut veneer edging. This stuff is easy to apply, but trying to get a nice finished result seems difficult unless you like sharp corners on the edge of your work. As I sanded I would start to sand away the edge of the walnut and expose the edge of the top layer of veneer underneath. It’s a good thing the Baltic birch has very thick veneer layers, or I probably would have exposed more than one. I don’t think I’ll use this type of edging material again because of this. Another sanding difficulty was that I found it remarkably easy to sand through the walnut veneer on the plywood, and difficult to notice that I had done so until much later. Advice on fixing this problem involves coloring the wood with pencils or something like that. I must not have the right pencils, because when I tried that it just looked worse. After I realized the dangers I felt very nervous about sanding. Should I just leave that defect in the wood because it’ll look even worse if I sand through the veneer?

I learned many things with this project, and despite the various problem I have identified above, the cabinet looks decent in the same room with the walnut coffee table, and it meets the goal of being utilitarian—it works.

My original Roorkhee chair was comfortable, but it was very low to the ground and deeply reclined. I prefer a more erect seating style, and thought I might raise the chair and make it less tilted. This proved to be considerably more difficult than I anticipated. It was easy enough to test the effect of taller legs by putting the first one up on blocks, but what happens if I decrease the seat tilt? I made some new back legs in pine with holes in different spots for testing and I found that raising up the back to make the seat more level wasn’t enough by itself. It wasn’t comfortable like that. It needed some other changes like a decrease in seat depth. I didn’t have a good way to prototype that. Decreasing the seat depth also leads to decreasing the width (if you want to keep the frame square to avoid complicating the assembly) and it’s not clear that would be a good thing. In addition it seemed like the location of the pivot point for the back rest needed to change. What seemed like a small change to the design turned out instead to requires global alterations. So I gave up and made a chair whose seat is farther from the ground, but with no other changes.

Another change with version two was the choice of leather. For the first one I used discount leather. That leather was too stretchy, especially for the arms. So this time I took a look at leather from Wickett & Craig, which Schwarz had used in some of his later chairs. Schwarz used the Oiled Latigo, but when I looked at the samples, all of the oiled Latigo leathers were almost black. I ended up choosing the English Bridle leather which is apparently the same leather, not oiled. The Latigo comes in a 6-8 oz thickness but the English Bridle is not split, meaning the leather comes off the cow the thickness it is. I could have paid an extra $1.10 per square foot to have it split and re-dyed, but decided to go ahead and use it as it came in a 8-10 oz weight.

One problem with the original Roorkhee was the narrow width of the arms. I noticed that I would try to rest my arms on the arm rests and they would fall off, so I corrected that in this version with arms that are wider.

The wider arm rest is definitely an improvement.

For the first chair I cut the leather and put it on the chair. But I subsequently learned about finishing the edges, which definitely produces a much nicer look. To do this I first beveled the edges with a leather edge beveling tool. Then I applied burnishing compound and burnished the leather vigorously with a leather burnishing tool. Finally I applied edge finish to the burnished edges.

The top edge is rounded and smooth after burnishing and edge painting.

The roundover on the front edges was intended to make the backrest more comfortable, though the leather is so stiff that it may not matter in this case.

For this chair I made the legs from canarywood scraps I had on hand—the only 8/4 material I had enough of. The wood is pretty, but I think it is harder than the ideal for hand powered reaming. (It is a good bit harder than hard maple.) I had more trouble cutting the mortises than on the first chair, and the finished joints were worse. I used maple dowels, and I ended up making the back supports out of some bland apple sapwood. From sitting in the original chair I had noticed that my shoulders and back would rub uncomfortably on the edges of the backrest supports, so for this version I was careful to give them a big roundover, though in the end it may not have mattered so much because of the heavy weight of the leather.

Here you can see the process of folding over the leather of the back rest. On the first chair, this part of the project was a little irregular, so I took more care this time, making measurements, keeping everything parallel, and clamping the pieces together before making the holes for the rivets. As it turns out, this particular measurement produced a very snug fit with the stiff leather I was using.

I determined the fold for the seat back by clamping the rail flush with the edge and folding the leather over for a snug fit. I marked the fold, removed the rail, and then clamped the leather down to punch the rivet holes.

The original design calls for square legs with a turned recess near the top and a turned taper towards the feet. Schwarz implies that the turned recess at the top is important because it gives you a place to grip the chair. My first one didn’t have this. For the second one I cut an octagonal recess. In order to do this I made a series of parallel crosscuts with the bandsaw and then cracked out the waste. This produces a rough square recessed area. Then I smoothed it out with the router plane, and then I marked out the proper edges and used rasps to remove the corners to transform the square into an octagon. The result looks pretty good, but in the end, the only function it serves is that it gives a space for the leather that is wrapped across the backrest to go when the backrest tilts. I never grab the chair by these “handholds” because the frame just twists. If I do another chair I think I might just make a single shallow cutout on the inside of the back legs for the leather and skip the rest of them.

Unlike the recess in the middle of the leg, the taper to the feet is simple to do without a lathe. I started by marking the octagon on the bottom of the leg and choosing the length of the taper to be 10.5 inches. Hand planes quickly removed the corners of the legs up to the octagon’s edges, leaving the shape shown below.Next I measured from one triangular facet to the opposite facet to find the spot where the thickness was equal to the 1.75 inch thickness of my leg stock. This is the right spot to start tapering the legs to get a regular octagonal cross section. I marked this starting line and then tapered down to the octagon’s boundary marked on the foot, finally obtaining the completed tapered octagon:

When I picked 10.5 inches I figured vaguely that the length of the taper on the square sides would be a bit smaller, perhaps by a factor like the square root of two. But working out the correct formula would have revealed that if I tapered the corners 10.5 inches I would only get a taper on the faces that went up about 4.25 inches. If I do this again I’ll run the taper up much higher. The length of the taper on the flat side is (S–T)d / (S√2–T) where S is the thickness of the full leg, T is the desired thickness at the tapered end, and d is the length of the taper on the corner of the leg stock.

So how does this chair work? Alas, it is not as comfortable as the first chair. One observation I made after sitting in the first chair for a while was that the way I constructed the seat, which seemed initially like an unfortunate mistake, was actually a fortuitous move. The seat came out considerably looser than I had intended, and this made the seat more comfortable by giving it mobility. I was careful to model this second chair after than one in that respect. (I marked a line eleven inches from each edge and folded the leather to that line.) However, the stiffer leather makes the back of the chair less comfortable. With the softer leather, the bottom part of the back rest conforms to my lower back and seems to give a remarkably comfortable support to the lower back. With this stiffer leather, the bottom of the backrest is simply too close to the seat and it pokes me on the butt without conforming at all. This isn’t so comfortable. After giving the chair more use I may try trimming off a few inches from the bottom of the seat.

But if I do that I’ll need to solve another problem first. Often when one leaves the chair the back ends up in a strange position. I have tried various schemes to stop this from happening. A perhaps related problem is the propensity of the bolts holding the back on to loosen themselves. I tried to solve these problems by inserting a lock nut under the wing nut, by using a wing nut and a thumbscrew, by inserting leather washers to increase friction, and by inserting Belleville spring washers to try to create tension that keeps everything together. None of these things worked—it always unscrews itself with use. If I remove leather from the bottom of the seat I’ll be taking more weight from the bottom and I’ll create an imbalance that will be even more troublesome. The only solution I can see is to add weights to the bottom of the seat supports, though that still doesn’t address the problem of the chair unscrewing itself.

The backrest connected using a wingnut and a brass thumbscrew in an unsuccessful attempt to create a locknut combination that would keep the chair from unscrewing itself.

The table is finally finished. The finishing process dragged on for an eternity, with lots of glitches and complications. I filled the pores on the table top using Crystalac Wood Grain Filler. I found this product to be extremely difficult to use. Sanding with anything coarser than P600 would pull it out of the pores, but the P600 would clog in 10 seconds. I ended up finding that a gentle sanding with abranet would work well, but I went through the abranet at a distressing rate. In the end, I have some areas where the pores aren’t entirely filled, and the filler created some blotching.

I guess you’d call this the front view. Normally this side faces the couch for ready access to the little drawers.

Each end of the table has a drawer under the tabletop, which overhangs nine inches. Some of my mahogany was lighter and some was darker: I used a lighter colored mahogany board for the drawer front and framed it with the darker material.

The drawer on the end holds the small card games. I added a divider insert to keep things organized. Note how the curve of the handle echoes the curve of the tabletop.

The table top is book matched “marbled” claro walnut. Look up at the previous picture to see the end grain, which also has an interesting swirling pattern.

This view shows how I curved the end of the table and the edge. I started cutting the profiles with a flat spokeshave, but found it tricky to get an even curve, so I switched to a roundover plane.

The little drawers below the shelf have small claro walnut handles that echo the shape of the tabletop.

The top drawer has a divider to create the pen and paper storage areas.

Here you can see the top drawer loaded up. We haven’t figured out what to put in the bottom one yet.

In this side view you can see how the handle is flat on top but cut at an angle underneath. This works very well and definitely makes the drawers easier to open and close. You can see the joinery here with the half-tail at the bottom to capture the drawer bottom.

The large drawer also uses the sloped underside on the handle, but here the center mount slide requires a large space below the drawer bottom, so the dovetails have a half-pin at the bottom.

From the side you can see the curve of the handle and the marbling of the claro walnut.

I’ve been calling this a “coffee table” but at 24 inches tall it’s not designed like a conventional coffee table. The prototype plywood on boxes was really starting to sag with a pronounced tilt to one side, so the family was jubilant when we could finally use the new table. Happily the design appears sound and it has been working well for game playing.

Here is the table with Ticket to Ride Team Asia underway. I used Ticket to Ride to determine the required width of the table.

I’ve been intrigued by the twisted dovetail joint, also known as nejiri arigata. This joint looks impossible to assemble because it appears locked in both directions. The secret is that it assembles diagonally. I needed a small trash can for tissues and decided that this gave me the opportunity to try out the joint. Here are the before and after pictures showing the cardboard box version adorning a mahogany writing desk, and the wooden replacement:

Before.

After.

To make this box I selected some apple wood I had lying around from when our apple tree fell down. I picked out all the interesting pieces—I’m not sure what I’ll do with the rest. The next challenge was to learn how to lay out this joint. Not like this

Everything looked spacious on the edge, but when the lines are carried down the sides that middle section is less than 1/16 inch wide.

I don’t have a chisel narrow enough to cut out that center bit. It took me a while to learn a method for laying this out, and nobody seems to have written about this in much detail. First of all, the joint is more like a twisted finger joint than a twisted dovetail. I guess “twisted finger joint” doesn’t have the same ring as “twisted dovetail.” The two halves are made the same way. I set my bevel gauge to a fairly steep angle (12°) to give a well defined slant and marked out along the edge. Then using the same angle I marked along the surface that is going to go outside the joint:

The important thing to note is that you always choose the angle of the cut to make a sharp pointy corner. I think about it as changing the direction of the line that I’m extending from the top edge. Next I mark the inside of the joint:

On the inside the lines make an obtuse angle. I think about this as continuing the line in the same direction as the line I’m extending from the top edge. So here is one side of the joint cut:

First half of joint viewed from the inside corner.

First half of the joint viewed from the outside corner.

To lay out the second half of the joint I mark the first half by lining them up like this. I would say this is easier than transferring a normal dovetail joint.

After marking the second half this way I extend the joint exactly the same way as for the first half. The only difference between the two halves is which part is marked for removal. The finished joint looks like this:

Second half of the joint viewed from the inside corner.

Second half of the joint viewed from the outside corner.

Perhaps you’re wondering how it all goes together. If you carefully look at the pictures from the inside corner of the two halves you may be able to see how it works. The joint slides together on a 45 degree angle and when viewed from the inside corner the parts line up like finger joints. Here it is partly assembled.

Here are a few observations about this joint. It doesn’t lock together the same way a dovetail joint does. Many of the sockets, due to their slope, tend to be trying to force the joint apart even while you’re trying to fit it together. This is different from a dovetail where the side walls are straight. When the joint is too tight it goes together like this:

I think this joint locks less well than dovetails, so it’s probably weaker. I found it necessary to use clamps during glue-up to ensure that the joint was actually all the way together. With dovetails, clamps aren’t usually needed, except possibly to coax the joint shut. When the joint didn’t fit I had a harder time figuring out why than with dovetails. In the end I think that a non-woodworker probably won’t notice the difference between this joint and a dovetail joint, so it’s probably the sort of thing one does just to impress and puzzle other people in the craft who wonder how it went together. In other words: this joint is not worth the trouble. Another lesson learned: don’t use dark colored glue. Note that the glue wicked up the end grain and left lines that couldn’t be planed away.